Luckily for us, the Australian performance artist known as Stelarc, formerly Stelios Arcadiou, is not prone to sensationalism.

He only wants to transform his body into a portal on the Internet. Which is why visitors to Exit Art, a gallery in Midtown Manhattan, are being treated to a video of Stelarc's left arm being cut up like a rare tenderloin to implant what will eventually be a Bluetooth-enabled artificial ear.

The body's evocative layers of skin, desire, and pain have long been a rich departure point for art-making. We take many of the body's conditions as givens: its materiality, its mortality, its role as both substratum and surface to the human soul.

The works in Exit Art's Corpus Extremus (LIFE +) prod at these givens. The projects here—many realized in conjunction with research labs, art-science organizations, or medical doctors—create entities that are ambiguously visceral: teeming tissue cultures, lab animals, synthetic appendages.